This is being a really weird year, weather-wise. The dry winter, with so little snow on the mountains; the premature heat wave, then a full week of buffeting melteme-type winds ( in May?) driving everyone off the beaches.

And now we're promised several days of dropped temperatures, rain, storms...in late June?

Checking the meteo.gr forecasts I thought at first it might be just in our neck of the woods but, looking farther afield for a bit of sun and sand on a precious day off, I see that most parts of Crete are going to be affected. I'm not complaining because we desperately need that rain, but tourists picking the wrong week for their holiday make get a nasty surprise.

My memory of a lot of previous Junes, is that this upcoming spell is really unusual. Anyone else keep records?

From the weather reports I've looked at we aren't exactly talking monsoon conditions. Perhaps 10 mm of rain spread over 5 days. Maximum daily temperature perhaps dropping as low as 28 C with minimum night time temperature down to 20 C. Not exactly Arctic. It would probably class as a heatwave in the UK. I'm sure all the wine growing regions of France and Germany get more than 10 mm of rain in June so I can't see it being catastrophic. There's only 2 of the days when rain is predicted where the probability is above 50 % so on the other three days it is more likely to not rain.

Yes ,it's not the rain it's the humidity ...sultanas are very ( and wine grapes to a lesser extent) prone to mould in humid conditions ...just now it is hot and dry perfect conditions the fruits have formed and the bunches are dense the gaps between the fruits are closing ..so if you have many stremas of grapes you might need to get out and spray with Bordeaux mixture to kill any mould spores before the rain or after dust with flowers of sulphur. ...that is a big job and the timing is crucial...lucky for me I only have three quarters of a strema of wine grapes so I will wait and see ...